The Hail That Became Ice Cream
One July hailstorm buried my squash patch in white pellets, and the whole neighborhood turned the mess into a block party dessert.
Hailstorms in southern Colorado arrive with no manners. The sky goes the color of a bruise, the wind changes direction twice, and then a sound like a thousand marbles falling on a tin roof rolls across the valley. My family has lived through eighty years of them. I thought I had seen everything.
This one came on a Wednesday afternoon in July, about four. I had just put the sheep in the barn and the hens in the coop when the first stones hit. They were the size of peas at first, then the size of grapes. I stood in the kitchen doorway with a cup of tea and watched the squash patch turn white as a snowfield. The National Weather Service had issued a warning that morning, and for once I had taken it seriously, which is why the greenhouse was covered and the truck was under the shed.
Twenty minutes later the sun came back and the whole yard was covered with a thick layer of hail, shining like a bowl of pearls. My grandson, who was visiting, ran out in his bare feet and scooped up a double handful. 'Grandma,' he said, 'we could make ice cream.' I looked at the cream in the refrigerator, at the sugar jar on the counter, at the old hand-crank freezer in the pantry, and I said, 'Go get the salt.'
Word got around. By six o'clock there were nine neighbors in my yard, each with a bowl and an opinion about vanilla. We cranked the freezer by turns. We used hail instead of store ice, and it worked beautifully, because it was already cold and already clean. An old farmer named Ignacio, who had lost half his beans to the same storm, said it was the best use of a hailstorm he had ever heard of. We ate until the sun went down.
The squash recovered. The ice cream did not last the evening. I put the story on farm.FM that fall under a title that made a few people write in, and I still get asked whether the recipe is real. It is. You just need a good storm and a patient grandchild.